Comment by HaZeust
3 hours ago
Christ, thank you! I’ve been saying this for years and no one I’ve spoken to, even engineers, could acknowledge the level of “chunking” that’s been engrained in them over the years for turning inquiries into keyword/phrase shorthand, and that this is NOT something most people want to do, and is the killer app of Google AI. This time around, you CAN type in an input box what you would say to a human in everyday conversation, AND expect a reasonable response. That’s invaluable to a casual user.
> this is NOT something most people want to do
I've always felt that "proper" and responsible LLM use for search [0] would be two boxes: You can describe what you want in the first, and it'll propose search terms in the second, and then those get executed normally.
Yes, the "average user" [1] might not usually care about the second box... Until they need to because the query/results are wrong.
Showing them in tandem means:
1. Users are at least capable of learning through exposure.
2. Users may realize a key term can be added which the model could never have guessed.
3. Users may recognize a term in there that doesn't make sense, allowing them to detect a translation error.
4. If good search-terms leads to a bad outcome, it is possible for someone to report and diagnose it, rather than a fully black-box mystery.
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[0] Not just for websites, but also things like internal business software, or SQL queries.
[1] The average that might not exist. ( https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc... ) There are some features that everybody needs, just at different times.
Your described thinking pattern does not apply to 95%+ users, and might add confusion leading to retention loss (e.g. 2 text boxes? Wtf, two boxes? What do i type in the second one? Whatever i’ll switch to the usual). Every project with at least 100K non-tech users I’ve worked on, has shown that sort of thinking just doesn’t translate.
And regarding “average doesn’t exist” - that’s true. But no company does a/b testing to land on average. I’d assume a good 85%-kinda pass rate for these type of experiments.